The mounting of an electronic equipment item, generally a display device, in an instrument panel, is not a simple problem for several reasons. The rear face of the equipment item is inaccessible during the mounting and once placement has been performed. The equipment item has a weight and a volume that are sufficient for the handling by an operator not to be easy. Moreover, the electrical connectors used generally comprise several tens of contacts and, consequently, the mounting thereof requires both great precision and a certain insertion force. Finally, the placement, both mechanical and electrical, must be perfectly ensured, given the constraints of safety and reliability inherent to this type of embedded hardware.
A first possible technical solution consists in placing, on the instrument panel, a mechanical “seat” comprising mechanical translational guiding means making it possible to correctly pre-position the equipment item when fixing it onto the instrument panel. This seat also comprises a female connector. The equipment item comprises the corresponding male connector. The guiding means and the positioning tolerances are calculated such that the connection of the two connectors is done perfectly during the mounting of the equipment item. Thus, the electrical connection and the mechanical connection are simultaneously assured. It will be understood that such a system is necessarily expensive and complex given the positioning tolerances in particular.
A second solution consists in performing the electrical connection and the mechanical connection separately. In this case, the female connector of the instrument panel is mounted on a sufficiently long electrical strand. The connector of the equipment item is first of all fixed onto this female connector. Once the electrical connection is established, the electronic equipment item, is mounted in the instrument panel. The drawback of this solution is that, to totally separate the two operations of mechanical and electrical connection, it is necessary to have a significant strand length so as to be able to totally extract the equipment item when mounting the electrical connector. Since the equipment item is necessarily mounted blind in the instrument panel, it is then difficult to perfectly check the placement of the strand behind the equipment item. Similarly, on extracting the equipment item, care must be taken not to damage the strand.